Saigon Corner: Turn off Hardware Graphics Acceleration in Office 2013

Turn off Hardware Graphics Acceleration in Office 2013

Scenario:

Sometime desktop crash when open Microsoft Office(Word, Excel, Powerpoint...)

Resolve: 

Microsoft Office 2013 is great software for Windows 8 and I am guessing that quite a few of you may be using it on your system. This productivity suite contains many technologies in-built inside it and sometimes due to them an average computer has to suffer. If your facing this issues like crashing of Office components or not running properly and freezing every now and then or if they only works in Safe Mode of Office, then technology named Hardware Graphics Acceleration may be the culprit behind this.

I found that many users having issues with working of Office 2013 on your system are often advised to disable hardware graphics acceleration. Almost in all of the cases, disabling the hardware acceleration for graphics does the trick and solves issues for many. In this article, I’ll show you how to disable hardware acceleration of graphics using the UI and of course, using my favorite Registry Editor.

Turn off Hardware Graphics Acceleration in Office 2013

Using UI

1. Open any Office 2013 component for example Word, and create a blank document, click FILE.

2. Next, click Options in the following screen:

3. Moving on, in the below shown window, select Advanced in the left pane. Then in the right pane, scroll down and lookDisable hardware graphics acceleration under the section Display. Check this option and click OK.

You may now close Office (Word) 2013 and reboot the machine. After restarting the system, you’ll find the issues you were facing in Office is resolved now.

Using Registry Editor

1. Press Windows Key + R combination, type put regedit in Run dialog box and hit Enter to open the Registry Editor.

2. In the left pane, navigate here:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Common

3. Firstly create a subkey to Common by right click over it and select New -> Key. Name this subkey as Graphics. In the right pane of Graphics subkey, create a new DWORD by right click on blank space and select New -> DWORD Value. Name the newly created DWORD as DisableHardwareAcceleration and double click on it to get this:

4. In the above shown box, change the Value data from 0 to 1. Click OK. Close the Registry Editor and reboot the machine to make changes effective.

The Internet.